Last press run for Parade in print
Parade – the magazine – has been a delight for generations of newspaper readers. The Sunday supplement, around since 1941, is colorful, concise, and cleverly packaged.
Alas, the print edition of Parade is no more. Starting last week you may peruse a digital edition of the magazine.
It’s all part of the new normal – normal above all meaning a precipitous decline in newspaper circulation (63.2 million paying customers in 1990; 25.8 million in 2020).
Needless to say, newspapers and newspapering, of which Parade is a part, aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time not that many years ago they were tops: everyone read the papers.
Bang! The morning paper – the Morning Herald – thumbed against the porch door each day close to dawn. Bang! The evening paper – the Evening Standard – arrived porch-side in the afternoon no later than 5.
Then the old man would bring from work one of the big city dailies – the Press or the Post-Gazette or the Sun Telegraph.
Three, maybe four, papers in a single day. It’s hard to imagine now.
The papers were read, then tossed. That’s the thing with dailies. Here today, in the trash at night.
There’s always more news tomorrow. New news.
Rare are the specific stories that stick in memory. Nearly as rare: headlines. Here’s one that’s 60-plus years old: “Shooting Off But West Was On,” about a now obscure basketball game and the not so obscure (maybe) Jerry West playing his last collegiate game in Pittsburgh. Love it.
You had to be there.
Working at the paper in Greensburg starting in the early ’90s was a survivor, a throwback, a refuge from the Pittsburgh Press, which folded in 1992. His name was Bill Mausteller.
Bill, who died a couple of years ago, was a professional newspaperman: unflappable in the face of deadline pressure, expert with words and sentences, both amused and amusing.
Bill had stories. Nothing scandalous. It isn’t clear what might have passed as scandalous as far as Bill was concerned. The world was what it was. Bill accepted it all without complaint, mostly. He was there to record, not to judge.
Bill’s tales involved men who frequently had no visible means of support other than their wit and a certain amount of frolicsome skulduggery. Irish guys. Gamblers. Pittsburgh characters. Genial, worldly gents.
The kind of guys you might expect a streetwise reporter to know. Guys with names like Fast Eddie.
(Bill made the acquaintance of one Billy Conn, the famous Pittsburgh light heavyweight who outscored Joe Lewis for 12 rounds in a 1941 fight before the heavyweight champ knocked him to the canvass in the 13th. Bill made Conn sound like a swell guy.)
Bill was always good for a laugh. A newspaper laugh.
Back to Parade. In the packed (newspaper) Sundays of long ago, it was like the glazed doughnut for lunch after church: hot and yummy.
Hot? Jane Fonda 1960 hot, baby. Jane was the cover girl of a Parade edition in the spring of that year. Her wardrobe: a towel. “Now they’re wearing towels” was the tease out front. Inside: Jane in her slender, bare-shouldered glory. (Jane Fonda turns 85 in December.)
Parade was nothing if not eclectic. That same edition contained predictions by ex-catcher Roy Campanella about the 1960 baseball season; a story about failing marriages; and a report by investigative reporter Jack Anderson on the health of seven presidential hopefuls, including John F. Kennedy.
(Anderson’s conclusion: though sickly, JFK was fit enough to serve.)
Throughout its 81-year print history, Parade was the soul of pop culture reportage. Proof: toward the end of the print run, yours truly was hard pressed to single out many – let’s make that most – of the cover celebrities.
Parade’s circulation went from 32 million just a few years ago to 16 million in January, according to Publishers Daily.
So: so long, print Parade; hello, e-Parade. Long may you be read.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.